First let's note that rioting is a pretty normal state of affairs. The inhabitants of ancient Alexandria were,
the historians tell us, "always
riotous." The
Gordon
Riots in 1780 London destroyed the city's two main prisons and damaged the Bank of England, as well as several embassies.

Speaking of which:

He had come prepared to incite a riot. The elements were there. The men already in the bar agreed with him and his friends that the barrier was
a bloody shame. A silence spread among them, like the thickening in the air before a storm. One man poked a hole through the screen with his cane. A cadet gave
it a shove. Someone else kicked it, and it moved. In a flash the whole crowd, suddenly excited and infuriated, rushed at the flimsy encumbrance and demolished
it. Amid the din X shouted: "Ladies of the Empire! I stand for liberty!" It turned out that there were no ladies present, soiled or otherwise; the
prostitutes had prudently decamped …

Sordid stuff. What was going on there was, a London music-hall (i.e. vaudeville theater) named
The Empire was laid out with a promenade space alongside
the men's bar so that ladies of the town could "describe their specialties and cite their prices in stage whispers." A crusader against vice had
persuaded the city council to erect a barrier between bar and promenade. This was the barrier destroyed in the riot on Saturday, November 3rd, 1894.

But who was X, the ringleader of the riot? None other than 19-year-old Winston Churchill, later to become Sir Winston Churchill, K.G., O.M., C.H., T.D.,
P.C., D.L., F.R.S., Hon. R.A., twice Prime Minister of Britain, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. (The quotes above are from William Manchester's
Visions of
Glory, pages 198-199.)

Not many of us have incited a riot on behalf of street hookers. Well, I know I never have. I can't even recall ever having been in a riot, though I had
a close brush with one once.

It was around 1970 in Nottingham, England. I was visiting the place on business, and went out drinking with some colleagues in the evening. We
heard a disturbance in the street outside our pub and went out to look. A mob of young men, more than a hundred, were storming up the street, yelling wildly
and swinging out with their fists against passers-by. It was simply terrifying. We ducked back into the bar and the mob flowed past. I have no idea why they
were rioting — something to do with
soccer, probably. (Where was
the Sheriff?)

A few years before that, English family vacations at the seaside were being ruined by the
Mods and Rockers wars. Rockers were English bikers. They had greased hair, sideburns, leather
jackets, and motorbikes. The Mod was an evolutionary precursor of the Metrosexual. He blow-dried his hair, wore a natty lapel-less suit, and rode a
motor-scooter. Mods and Rockers
hated each other. They came out in force on summer weekends and fought pitched battles on England's few decent beaches.

Now, these recent riots and mob attacks in the U.S.A. have all featured young blacks, and I'm just the kind of impertinent, shameless commentator you'd
expect to dwell on the fact. Why then am I trying to dilute the truth by dredging up all these cases of white folk rioting? Here's why.

If you have been born and raised in the U.S.A., race is never far from your mind. Native Americans — people like my
kids — have a mental Race Buzzer that goes off in a thousand different contexts, and whose purpose is to drown out certain kinds of thoughts. The
darn
thing's on a hair trigger. If you were raised in some other place where race was a thing people hardly ever thought about, this is really hard to get used to.
Trust me on this.

It was only in the 1990s, for example, when the fuss about
The Bell
Curve came up, that I realized why everyone was so agitated over the book. The expression "IQ," heard by raised-in-America ears, sets off the
Race Buzzer.
It doesn't do that for the rest of us. (Nor for trained professional psychometricians: Only three of The Bell Curve's 22 chapters say anything about
race.)

An Englishman of my generation had his principal notions about IQ formed by Michael Young's 1958 book
The Rise
of the Meritocracy, which is a fictional exploration of the consequences, mostly negative, of stratifying a society by "merit," defined as IQ
plus effort.
There is nothing about race in the book at all. It takes place in a fictional future Britain that, like Britain in 1958, is 99 percent monoracial. The riot
comes at the end, when the narrator gets stomped to death by a low-IQ, but again entirely white-English, mob.

American race panic, if you're not raised with it, just seems a bit odd, like the Chinese obsession with "face" or Muslims fretting about
women showing their hair — a quirk of the national character. I bang my shins against it all the time, even around the family dinner table:

Mom: Those people at Number 70 down the street? Their son
got into MIT.

Dad: Wow, that's great. They're Jewish, aren't they?

Daughter: Dad! For heaven's sake! You're a
disgrace!

Dad: What? What'd I say?

The rule here, the rule I met when it was too late to internalize it, is that you're not supposed to notice. He's black, she's yellow, they're
Jewish. We all know it, but for goodness' sake don't mention it.

That's why all those reports about mobs, gangs, and riots in Philadelphia, Chicago, Peoria, and D.C. are telling us about "youths,"
"teens," or "thugs." In the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube uploads we can all perfectly well see that the perps are black, but it
would be a gross breach of etiquette (one I just committed, I guess) to let on that you'd noticed. I just watched a segment of
the O'Reilly
show titled "Violent Teen Mobs Causing Chaos Across Country." In the entire 6m15s segment neither
Laura Ingraham nor either of her two guests used any of the terms "black," "African American," or "colored."

So that's why I'm pondering non-black civil disturbances. I'm an immigrant. Like any immigrant — any immigrant of my age and background, that
is — I want to be more native than the natives. I want to hear that all-American buzzer go off in my head, the one that tells me: Don't notice!
Riots happen everywhere, all the time! These are just youths, just teens!

What, after all, is the point of thinking otherwise? There's a problem here that has no solution. Never has had, never will have. We're stuck with it
for ever, and in our hearts we all know it. Best policy: train yourself not to notice.